Just Tell Us What You're Eating

"

Ruins, volcanoes, old buildings, blah, blah, blah. I know what you really want is to see what we are eating. So because I really don't feel like writing now and every one is interested in food, here you go...

Chiles en Nogada. One of my favorite dishes in Mexico, originally from Puebla. A big chile poblano, stuffed with ground pork, spices, dried fruit and other tasty things. Fried and covered with a white walnut sauce along with pomegranate seeds and parsley, the colors of the Mexican flag. 

Pork,with mole verde...

Salad of cheese, avocado and zucchini flowers...

Grilled goat udder. Yes, you read that right. 

Mole de Caderas, a wonderful red mole with goat spine and hips. Maybe the most wonderful thing of the whole trip. 

The result of eating this...

Escamole...ant eggs. 

Canejo in huitlacoche...corn fungus. 

Mole Poblano

Chile poblano stuffed with meat and ancho chiles...

The same thing with tomato sauce...

Enchiladas with cochinita pibil, a pork dish from the Yucatan. 

Eating quesadillas in the market...

Rica Pancita...a spicy red soup with nasty pork parts. 

Lesson of this trip: anywhere there is a large cauldron of boiling liquid, you know it will be awesome. 

On the Route of the Convents around Popocapetl... And, Atlixco

Gonna post pix...

A Wandering Soul in Tepoztlan

Wow today is already Sunday and we've been in Tepoz four nights! And no blog. 

Some highlights:  

Our wonderful hotel, Ma Petite Maison and Luis, our host.  

Food.  Our favorite restaurants: antojitos Mayre, in the market, with the huaraches of mushrooms, the Aztec/vegetarian food stall with amazing huitlacoche quesadillas, the only thing we liked at the upscale La Ciruela was the tower of nopal and cuitlacoche, and of course Los Colorines with excellent mole poblano, excellent chiles en Nogada and a good broccoli version of a chile rellleno.  Ice cream from tepoznieves and pay de queso, cheesecake 

Music all the time. It's not yet seven am and I hear the tuba of an oompapa comparza band.... We saw kids doing the rhythm to capoeira.... And we've had a full day of Mexican dance and music for dia de todos santos.  Also the opener band, Sitting in the churchyard hearing Javier Rivera y su Orquesta warm up their horns, for some danzon, while watching local kids in their dance costumes getting ready for their performances.   Since this town tends towards supporting New Age themes you can also hear meditation music and even Indian ragas at times. 

Side trips to cool towns - San Juan Tlacotenco. Amatlan.  Today we might go to Ocotitlan. 

Day of the dead with children out getting candy while walking past hot bonfires... Beautiful lit calaveritas.... 

Woke last night at 2 or 3 am long after the fireworks singing and laughing crowd noises had died down, to long peals of church bells! Sounded like from every chapel in town. My goodness this is a serious holiday here! Today now is day of the dead for real, (November 1 was dia de Todos Santos, all saints, now is all souls, dia de Muertos) - all the adult souls have arrived here gotten here by the scent of the food and flowers, and tonight candles placed or processed to the graveyards will help them find their way back to the land of the dead. And I imagine church bells will ring again tonight. And then, we fly home tomorrow! Such a great experience here.  And the six am bells have begun the roosters are crowing a few dogs are barking and I hear a far off music bass line. Dawn is coming...

Now I'm writing this after breakfast.  sitting just off the beautiful trail up to the Tepozteco, the beautiful pyramid way above town, sitting against the trunk of a massive tree listening to soft bird trills and chirps. Craig is hiking up again.  We went to the market for our breakfast, had chocolate champurrado, a drink made of either rice or corn, and then we had quesadillas on freshly made blue corn tortillas, with a filling of  huitlacoche and zeta mushrooms - sort of like oyster mushrooms- and white cheese, with an assortment of savory chile sauces to put on, with some cafe de Lola, cowboy coffee.  Then back to our tiny hotel for some fruit and real coffee.  In the impromptu market, all the day of the dead supplies are gone, instead it looked like a French market, pristine market tall stacks of perfect vegetables and a butchers stall with  big loops of longaniza sausage and stacks of the local specialty a type of cured meat called ???? 

Dia de Muertos Preparation

All over Mexico during the last week of October, Mexicans get ready for Dia de Muertos, November 1st and 2nd. Here are some pictures of what goes on. 

I wanna be a rodeo gal

Tlaxcala is the capital of a small state and so, compared to Puebla, it's a wonderfully serene town -- until it's time for the fair.  Then, since the State of Tlaxcala is a ranching state, it's particularly time for rodeo competitions ("charreadas") and bullfights.  One of the biggest pleasures for me since childhood is watching the beautiful dressage/horse ballet by teams of young women riding sidesaddle in sweeping flouncy skirts -- kind of like the Hawaiian horse women of old, but these ladies can move! 

Tlaxcala State Fair like other states has a great exhibition hall -- but I don't know of too many state fairs with giant sandpaintings like this one, in front of a shrine to the ancestors for Day of The Dead.  I used to know some of the elements that need to be in a shrine, I just know this one has candles, sugar cane, amaranth, corn stalks, beautiful loaves of egg bread, bananas, oranges,  jicama and samples of all the local produce and artisan products, 

Here are some of the elements:

The teams getting ready have to put on their chaps and spurs,

 then it's into the arena for competitions, team by team,

  on how well you stop your horse from a gallop, turn it clockwise and counterclockwise around the hind quarters, and back it out of the arena in a straight line From there it's on to grabbing a steer by the tail and flipping it, lassoing young horses by the two hind feet, and finally, riding young bulls and bronco horses and then lassoing them.  All of this to loud norteño style music blaring on the loudspeakers and a great announcer who eggs the crowd on to applause, and tells jokes at the expense of us gringos.  

Our announcer:

Rodeo pics: 

I love this one because you can see the beautiful volcano La Malinche rising east of town 

Even though it seemed like the steers, bulls and unbroken horses were very old hands at this -- they sometimes bucked kind of halfhearted and seemed to know exactly,which gate would lead them back to their stalls -- and even though the standard roping process is really kind of mean to 

do just as an exhibition -- the rodeo was a great success for us and everyone else, we all enjoyed our bleacher seats, the announcer and the great show of male bravado and female skill. And a great trip back to the time when managing cattle for the great haciendas was an honourable profession.  We'd love  visit one of the many ex-haciendas around here.  The rodeo was fun! 

And of course - it begins and ends with the girls. We want to come back some year mid-November for the competition between the all-girl teams of "escaramuzas". 

We were the ONLY foreigners in the fair as far as we could see.  It's a fair like ours with lots of rides and stalls selling the same international good see see, but some other fair highlights are musical bands playing for cheerleaders, birds that tell your fortune, the local candies and snacks made from amaranth seed...

after the fair, in Tlaxcala's main square, we saw some folkdancers doing the dances they usually do for Carnaval

Checked into our hotel, where as you can see the decorations for Day of the Dead continue

Someone connected to the hotel was a photographer hence the repeating theme I 

And this morning we caught the Monday morning ceremony of the raising of the flags of Mexico and Tlaxcala with goose stepping soldiers and a big brass band.

Monday is a rather quiet day in Tlaxcala and a good day of rest for me. Time for new experiences, a delicious meal of ant eggs cooked in epazote, rabbit in adobo sauce and a big pitcher of mineral water with lime juice

We saw the wonderful Museum of Memories which has the original grant of Carlos the V to the Tlascallans (a grant by the distant Spanish king giving them ownership of their own lands, how weird is that?) and lots of other beautiful historical documents 

Like this papal bull - those edict thingys like the papal bull that excommunicated Martin Luther at about this same time period and kicked off the Protestant Reformation

This Tlascallans genealogies... Like the Hawaiian ali'i-- it mattered a lot who you were born of! 

This offer to make money by traveling to see a bullfight!  Go figure..

Towards evening we saw this lovely church 

With a little joke about La Malinche